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Comment by afro88 | Hacker News Reader

I find it disconcerting that an article about cognitive debt contains many "tells" of being written by AI.

Independent of that, the article is just a summary of a HN thread...

I had the same reaction, but the article is not AI-generated according to pangram, which I've generally found reliable. I wonder if LLM turns of phrase and even thought patterns are creeping into normal human thought.

Or, stay with me here, the LLMs were trained on how we, statistically, write.

There are typical LLM voices and styles, just like human writers have differentiated voices and styles. And some common elements of the typical LLM style are distinct from humans I've previously read.

I recognize this. It's also the case that I suspect that I've read more about how annoying suspected LLM output is to read than I have read LLM output. The slop is, to me, an incredibly unwelcome contribution of humans that don't enjoy the craft but complaining about it is equally stuck in and further exacerbating the froth rather than distilling down to the substance. That is it keeps the focus on the surface rather than on what the core content is and whether it has value.

LLM writing doesn’t have substance, it’s statistically likely text generated from some bullet points, without intention or style.

When you say "we" you're talking about Twitter, right?

I used that once, during a conference about 6 years ago and never again since. My use of "we" references humanity.

In that case, I feel that "we" needs some correction. Because these slopcannons get their ammunition from scraping the gargantuan septic tanks of the Internet, like Twitter and Facebook and whatever 600M Chinese people are using that I've never heard of.

Comparatively very little of that "humanity" corpus is coming from Shakespeare or Swift or Douglas Adams, much as we might prefer if it did.

I never claimed it was trained on the notables of humanity. On the other hand, to your adjacent point (to twist it) that humanity needs some correction, I whole heartedly agree.

Anytime I see “this is not just x, it’s y” i can almost guarantee with high degree of confidence that slop was used.

As someone from outside the Anglophone cultural sphere, when I first learned to write in English, the kind of writing that AI now often produces was taught to me as “formal" writing.

But these days, when I write in that formal style, people sometimes say it sounds like AI. That has been a difficult and frustrating point for me.

I still find the subtle difference hard to understand.

I was raised and educated well inside the Anglosphere (USA) and was also taught to write formally in that way.

Do the people who say you sound like AI give you any specifics?

Also, if you don't mind, what was your English education like? I understand that quite a few Americans work in South Korea as teachers but I have no details about how that manifests.

That used to happen to me more often. When I first came to HN, and even now if I am not careful, my comments can get flagged. Also, when I translate from Korean using DeepL and paste the result, people often say it sounds flagged, awkward, or unnatural. I studied English more seriously in graduate school, although I dropped out. In Korea, there are quite a few Americans who teach English. Public schools often have native English-speaking instructors, but in my case I learned English more seriously at graduate school, and universities also make students study English almost semi-compulsorily.

In Seoul, there are probably many teachers who mainly teach middle and high school students, but a lot of that is through private education rather than the public school system.

I'm still pissed that I had to practice removing that from my writing habits. I liked that device, dammit!

It's not just AI-generated, it's also slop!

It's worth mentioning pangram is more confident in it's positive detections than it's negative ones, as stated by the founder in an interview on the most recent ThursdAI episode

I think its bidirectional. We change our writing based on what we see (AI generated content on the internet) and AI will learn based on what we write.

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